Old School Hacks/1
by Lord_evron
While visiting my parents last week, I rediscovered a drawer full of my old electronics. It had been untouched for at least 15 years, and I unearthed a couple of cool hacks from my youth that I thought were worth sharing.
The first is quite simple. Back then, I was fortunate enough to own an IBM PC with an 80286 processor. I still remember my 20MB hard drive and 3.5” floppy disk drive. The 3.5” floppies came in three main capacities:
- single sided with 360 KB capacity (with one hole on the base)
- double side with 760 KB capacity (with one hole on the base)
- Double side High Density with 1.44Mb capacity (with two holes, on the base)
All the diskettes had a write-protect hole, and the second hole was exclusive to high-density disks.
As a 7 or 8-year-old, I didn’t understand disk capacities. However, I had a lot of games, and I noticed I could copy them onto some disks but not others. I quickly figured out that the “two-hole” disks were the good ones. One day, I desperately needed to copy a game but was out of high-density floppies. Frustrated, I took matters into my own hands and drilled a second hole. Here’s a picture of a floppy disk with the added hole circled in red.
Surprisingly, the game copied successfully! The PC used that second hole to determine if a disk was high-density. Although this trick wasn’t foolproof, I effectively doubled the capacity of most of my floppies for free.
One final note about the write-protect hole: to reuse write-protected floppies (the kind without the sliding window), a small piece of tape over the hole did the trick.
This same technique also worked with music cassettes. Speaking of which, my next post will cover a more complex hack involving cassette players…